Visiting Faculty

Laura Sadykova

Visiting Faculty

Laura Sadykova graduated from the Timiryazev Moscow Agricultural Academy. Then she successfully graduated from the Kazakh Research Institute of Livestock Research, defending her thesis for the degree of Candidate of Agricultural Sciences. For several years she worked as a scientific, then senior researcher in the scientific research institute of the food industry. Then she moved to administrative work related to the management of science and education. Worked at different positions in the Ministry of Education and Science, in the Ministry of Agriculture of the Republic of Kazakhstan. After working in the ministries, she graduated from the Kazakhstan Institute of Actual Education with a degree in Finance and continued her work at the Kazakh Agrotechnical University in Astana. She published independently and co-authored more than twenty scientific articles on agricultural topics. Currently she performs research work together with colleagues on the theme: "Scientific and methodological foundations for the formation of an innovative ecosystem of research universities." The authors of the project have prepared and published methodological recommendations on the construction of an innovative ecosystem in research universities of the Republic of Kazakhstan on the basis of studying the current state of Kazakhstan universities and the experience of international research universities. At Michigan State University, she continues to study international experience in the formation of research universities, as well as issues of economic diversification and the agricultural sector of Kazakhstan.

Secil Pacaci Elitok

Secil Pacaci Elitok received her PhD in Economics from the University of Utah (USA) in 2008. From 2009 to 2011 she worked for the Hamburg Institute of International Economics (HWWI) as a Marie Curie Fellow as part of the EU Marie Curie Research Training Network TOM (Transnationality of Migrants). From 2012 to 2013 she worked as a Mercator–IPC Fellow at Istanbul Policy Center (IPC) at Sabancý University, working on a research project entitled “The Role of Migration in EU/German-Turkish Relations”. During this time she taught a module on the “Politics of Migration” at Sabancý University and worked as a consultant to the World Bank on a number of international mobility research projects. Before her appointment as visiting adjunct professor at CERES (Center for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies) at Michigan State University, Dr. Elitok worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at the MiReKoç (Migration Research Center at Koç University). She obtained her associate professorship in March 2016. Her main research interest is international migration with a specific focus on migration to and from Turkey, as well as high-skilled migration, return migration and remittances.

Akarturk Karahan

Akartürk Karahan (Ph.D., Ankara University, 2009) is a research scholar at the Center for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (CERES) of Michigan State University in 2016-2017. Akartürk Karahan is an Associate Professor of the Department of Turkish Language and Literature at Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University. A scholar of the Old Turkic Language with a focus on Old Uygur, Qarakhanid, Old Kipchak lexicology and Old Turkic dialectology. Her first book is XIth Century’s Turkic Dialectology According to the Divanu Lugati’t-Turk[Divanu Lugati’t-Türk’e Göre XI. Yüzyıl Türk Lehçe Bilgisi, (Ankara, 2013)]. In this book, the Old Turkic dialects of the Mahmud Kashgari's work, Divanu Lugati’t-Turk, were dealt with in a historical-modern comparative linguistic method. Her second book is Conjunctions in Old Uygur [Eski Uygurcada Bağlaçlar, (Ankara, 2014)]. Since that time, her research and publications have focused on historical Turkic language’s lexicogology issues. She has been awarded research scholarship from the TUBITAK. Professor Karahan's current research is thelanguage contacts of the X- XII. centuries Turkic languages. She has been preparing two books on an unknown Ottoman poet and writer Sherafeddin Bey (1889-1922)’s letters and poems with Professor Timur Kocaoğlu.